 |
|
|
 News from Around the Americas | June 2007 
UN No Longer Seen as Neutral, Says Former Chief
 Anne Penketh - Independent UK
go to original
| | Gordon Brown, left, acknowledges applause beside Tony Blair at a special Labour leadership conference in Manchester, England Sunday June 24, 2007. Britain's Treasury chief Gordon Brown, who will become prime minister on Wednesday, vowed on Sunday to change Britain to meet new priorities, taking over from Tony Blair as leader of the Labour party days before he succeeds Blair as prime minister. (AP/Simon Dawson) |
The Iraq war has shattered the cause of humanitarian intervention endorsed by Tony Blair and directly led to the targeting of relief workers in conflict zones where they are no longer considered to be neutral, according to a former senior UN official.
In a speech in London tonight, Sir Mark Malloch-Brown will say: "The brutal truth is politics is making it harder and harder to serve victims' needs by reaching them with assistance or bearing witness to their suffering and thereby staying the hand of those who would harm them."
Mr Blair's belief in the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, or the use of force to advance moral causes, led to Nato's air war with Serbia to halt the ethnic cleansing of Kosovars, and later to British military intervention in Sierra Leone. The doctrine was also used to rally international support for the invasion of Afghanistan.
Sir Mark, the former UN deputy secretary-general under Kofi Annan, however, points out that the Sudanese President, General Omar al-Bashir, has been able to use the Iraq invasion as the prime reason to delay acceptance of a UN force in Darfur. "Tony Blair and George Bush have repeatedly called for the right kind of action in Darfur only to be rebuffed as the architects of Iraq. Bashir has tried to make them his best weapon."
"It is not their loss of credibility that concerns me today, but rather that of humanitarian workers. The trouble is the two are linked," he goes on. "I have watched the work I used to do get steadily more dangerous as it is seen as serving Western interests rather than universal values."
While at the UN, he says, he would see the maps of Darfur showing ever-widening yellow circles that mark no-go areas for humanitarian workers. "Iraq is the immediate cause for this. And 9/11 the preceding trigger - but both come at the end of a process that has knocked humanitarian work off the straight and narrow of non-political impartial help ... bringing help to the needy."
Sir Mark describes similar problems for humanitarian workers in such diverse places as Colombia and Gaza, where, he says "with Western support to Fatahland and a political-economic blockade of Hamastan, as one journalist put it, sides are being taken. The humanitarian effort is not neutral." More unarmed aid workers than military peacekeepers are being lost. Sir Mark's warning at an event organised by the International Rescue Committee comes after the Darfur head of mission for Médecins sans Frontières, Mark Fark, expressed concern that relief workers were being targeted by all the rival factions in Sudan's western province. "It's a free for all," he said. "All parties see the humanitarians as legitimate targets either for political reasons or as a resource," he said, referring to robberies in which cars, food deliveries or mobile telephones are stolen.
Sixty aid workers were killed in Darfur last year.
Sir Mark argues that despite the setbacks for humanitarian work - including the death of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top UN official for Iraq, in a bombing four years ago - Iraq's neighbours, which are home to more than two million refugees, could be the launchpad of a new effort to restore the neutrality of international aid workers.
But he adds: "It must be separated from the US-led political and security process and be there in its own right." |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us